Nov 29, 2007

Man oh man! Every time I turn around I am finding out another cool free thing from Google! I just don't understand how these guys stay in business. They offer some of the coolest apps, and services all for free!

(Yes I know, I know, they make money from advertising, I don't want to hear about it in the comments.)

This particular service I just crawled out from under a rock and discovered is Googles Apps. I guess I never noticed it before because the name isn't very descriptive of what it really is.

According to the Google Apps page, this services lets you:

Communicate...Give your users Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk accounts that use your own custom domain, helping them to stay connected and work together more effectively. New! IMAP support for Gmail

Collaborate and publish...Google Docs lets users share files and collaborate in real-time. The Start Page is the first place your users will look to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web.

...and get on with business.It's all hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to install or download, and minimal setup and maintenance. You can get up and running quickly, even if you don't have technical resources.

Did you hear that? FREE custom email, and collaboration tools using your domain name! How friggin' awesome is that? Think about it, just the email functionality alone. If you buy a domain name from Godaddy, and want them to host your email, at their cheapest plan you get one measly email address, with only 25MB of storage for $9.99 per year. With Google Apps, you get 100 email addresses, 5GB of storage per address, you get to put your logo on it, and use your domain name all for FREE!

Not to mention other cool stuff like custom calendar, docs page, and my favorite, your own personal iGoogle like start page. Check out mine: http://start.bauer-power.net.

Check it out for yourself! If you own a domain, then their isn't really a reason not to have your own custom email address any more!